Has anyone tried the Canon D10 for jewelry photography? I’m
attempting to do my homework on buying a digital SLR, and have it
narrowed down to the Canon D10, the Canon Digital Rebel, and the
Nikon D70. Has anyone used any of these cameras?

I bought a very slightly used D60 (the Canon model before the D10)
and we love it. The reason I went with the D60 is that it has more
features than we’ll ever use, and many people are selling them at
great prices so they can upgrade to the D10 (we got ours for under
$800). The other reason we went Canon is that we already have a full
EOS set of film bodies and professional L lenses, which fit the D60
(my husband and I are both also freelance writers and authors).

A few things to remember: the lens is probably more important than
the body, so investing less in the body (used D60) and more in an L
lens (or two) and a great tripod is smart. Remember that the digital
format causes a bit of extra telephoto in the lenses. That makes my
macro zoom perfect for jewelry. The controls are very intuitive. One
negative: the preview screen is small, and scratches easily.

I can set up my Powerbook with the Canon attached to it on its
tripod for a photoshoot. It will load the picture immediately into my
computer at full size on the screen, and I can immediately see if I
like the lighting, the composition, the focus. There is a full array
of data showing what my exposure, speed, white balance, color
saturation, etc., was for each shot, so I can adjust the next one.

I just had some 24x36 posters made from images from my D60, and they
are awesome.

I can highly recommend Canon: I have used their cameras
professionally as a journalist for 25 years–F1s through the new
digitals-- and they are fantastic, reliable workhorses. Never had one
fail. Briefly sold our Canons to invest in full Leica line, and was
deeply disappointed and mad as the Leicas were just not reliable
enough.

You might want to look into the digital Canon Powershot G5. It is
an excellent camera for photographing jewelry, as it has great Macro
capability. You might want to check out the review of this camera
on steves-digicams.com. Steve gives a highly detailed report on this
camera, and gives it a 5 star rating… It comes with software which
makes editing a breeze, and the camera is user friendly. It fits
the professional bracket on the cloud dome in case you want to use
it for your photography.

Just wondering if anyone has used the Cannon Powershot A60? Its
probably a primitive tool these days, any hot tips ?? I want to take
some shots for my up and coming website. I have taken some
interesting and impressive shots using a sheet, a plate of glass and
some lighting, the result gave the impression that the jewellery was
floating.

But I have been told that the detail is too much for website
purposes, “any recommendations” ? should I just keep it simple?? What
colour gives the best background, The jewellery is made with
different coloured beads, so black doesn’t really show the majority
off to their full potential.

In the August 2004 issue of mobilepc magazine, there is a short blurb
that reads as follows:

"Download a simple firmware hack and you can turn an $800
Canon Digital Rebel into the functional equivalent of Canon's
more powerful, $1,300 Canon EOS-10D, free. All the 10D's
advanced features are latent in the Digital Rebel's hardware -
it's just that some of them have been disabled by the
manufacturer. For details, see
www.bahneman.com/liem/photos/tricks/digital-rebel-tricks.html.
(Note: These tricks will void your camera's warranty.)"

I hope this helps. By the way, I don’t know what to say by way of
introduction. I started on this path several but not many years ago
with seed beads, to lampwork, to metal fabrication, and hope to move
on to lapidary at some point. Day job is technology
(could you tell from the posting?).

Hi Tina. I am not sure what you mean by “too much detail”. If your
file size is appropriate, good detail would seem like a positive. If
the download time is too high, adjust your dpi to make your file size
smaller. Your Canon should be entirely adequate for taking images for
your website-digital cameras have improved exponentially, but the
computer screens still only display 72dpi so most of the advances are
only useful for print purposes. If your beads are transparent or
translucent, I have found underlighting to be helpfull in bringing
out the color. Take your piece of glass and raise it up so you have
some room and place one light source below and behind it, but still
use at least one other light from the top or side, or everything
looks kind of flat. If your lighting is too direct and you get glare,
you can place a sheet of paper on the glass before you lay down the
beads to diffuse the light. This might still give you the “hanging
in air” look that works so well on the 'net, and give your beads more
pizazz than toplighting. The best upgrade I have made in my camera
setup was not a better camera, but better lighting. I bought color
corrected flourescents and turn off all other lights, giving me a
true 'daylight" light source that I can move around. They are pricier
than regular bulbs, but they last 10,000 hours and made a huge
difference in how much time I spend color correcting in photoshop,
even with the adjustable white balance feature my camera has. The
bulbs work in the cheapo gooseneck lights I bought at the discount
store. Hope this helps, Marggi

Lately I have started to make my website and new portfolio as well.
At first I used a normal reflex camera Nikon F60. The pictures were
nice, but that was it. Then I tried the digital camera of my father,
and what a difference. No quality loss or anything. But for the
website they were indeed to big, as you mentioned. Luckely my
boyfriend is a computer geek and he told me how to make the
resolution smaller. I used photoshop to do so.

For the background and lightning I used homemade stuff. De
background are 3 MDF-plates which I painted black and putted into a
corner. So I had a kind of box. Then I used just ordinary spotlight,
desk lamp and candles. For me the last worked the best. I also
disabled the flash in the camera so I wouldn’t get an overload on
highlights in the picture. Just try out different things to see what
suits you best. I move the lamps to different spots, but never point
to the jewelry itself. It will reflect too much light.